In a January 29th post on X, Elon Musk stated that his company had successfully implanted chips into the human brain and that patients were recovering well. Neuralink is developing a brain implant designed to help patients with severe paralysis use neural signals to control external technologies.

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Elon Musk once said he would have a Neuralink chip implanted in his brain. (Image: NurPhoto)

Neuralink began recruiting patients for human clinical trials in the fall of 2023 after receiving authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct research in May 2023, according to a blog post.

Musk said Neuralink's first product is called Telepathy.

If the technology works as intended, patients with serious degenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may one day be able to communicate or access social media by using their minds to move the cursor and type.

"Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a super-fast typist or an auctioneer," Musk wrote. " That's our goal."

The brilliant British physicist Stephen Hawking also lived with ALS from the age of 21 and spent his life in a wheelchair. He passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76.

Clinical trials on humans are just one step on Neuralink's path to commercialization. Medical device companies must go through multiple rounds of data collection and rigorous testing before securing final approval from the FDA.

Neuralink has not disclosed how many patients will participate in the initial human trials. Positioned within the emerging brain-computer interface (BCI) industry, Neuralink is perhaps the most well-known company in this field, thanks to the fame of Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

BCI is a system that decodes brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies. Several companies, such as Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, Paradromics, and Blackrock Neurotech, have also created systems with these capabilities.

Paradromics is aiming to launch its first human trials in the first half of this year. Precision Neuroscience conducted its first clinical trial on humans last year. A patient receiving Synchron's BCI used it to post from CEO Tom Oxley's Twitter account in 2021.

It is unclear which company launched first.

(According to CNBC)